My larger education : $b Being chapters from my experienceWashington, Booker T.
General
My larger education : $b Being chapters from my experience
Washington, Booker T.
African Americans -- Biography; Educators -- United States -- Biography; Washington, Booker T., 1856-1915
In the Tompkins Memorial Hall 1700 students during the school term
take their meals three times daily. The building cost approximately
$175,000, and is the largest building on the Institute Grounds.
]
[Illustration:
TRADE SCHOOL AT HAMPTON INSTITUTE
]
A week or ten days later I met at Skibo Castle in the Highlands of
Scotland, Lord John Morley, at that time secretary of state for India.
During the time that I was there the question of the condition of the
labouring classes was several times touched upon in conversation and
some reference was made to the condition I have referred to. I recall
that Lord Morley listened to the discussion for some time without making
any comment. Then he said very positively that, in spite of all that had
been said, the English labourer was, in his opinion, in a greatly better
position to-day than he had ever been before in his history. I was the
more impressed with this statement because it came from a man who has a
world-wide reputation as a scholar and a writer, and who is at the same
time a member of what is the most democratic government that has ever
ruled in England, a government, also, that has sought to do more than
any other to improve the living conditions of the labouring classes.
The experience I had among the poorer classes in London helped me to
realize, as I had not done before, the opportunity that the Negro, in
spite of the discriminations and injustices from which he suffers, has
in America to-day, and particularly in the Southern States, where there
is still opportunity to get land, to live in God’s open country and in
contact with simple, natural things, compared with that of the people in
the crowded English cities, where hundreds of thousands of them live
practically from hand to mouth and where one tenth of the population,
according to an investigation some years ago, are living either in
poverty or on the edge of destitution.
At the present moment the national government, in conjunction with the
city of London, is spending immense sums of money in laying out parks,
in building public baths, model tenements and lodging houses in some of
the poorer quarters of the city. Better than all else, they are building
out in the suburbs, on some of the vacant land outside the city,
beautiful garden cities, rows and rows of model houses, each with its
little garden in front of it, and each provided with every convenience
that modern invention and science can suggest to make it healthful,
convenient, and comfortable. As a result of this improvement, thousands
of working people are being removed every year from the dark, gloomy,
and unhealthy regions of the overcrowded city to these free, open
spaces, where they have an opportunity to get in contact with God’s free
air and sunlight.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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